Sunday, October 12, 2014

Saturday night's concert of the fabulous bluegrass group the Steep Canyon Rangers was terrific -- great musicians playing beautiful music against a stunning backdrop of Autumn finery at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was the final in a series of 20 weekly concerts sponsored by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation in alliance with a number of local and regional sponsors that have made the music scene along the Plateau District a don't-miss stop along Virginia's Crooked Road. Here's a scene from up on the hill above the outdoor amphitheater:

The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation has had a nearly year-long association with the Steep Canyon Rangers (which has toured with banjoist and comedian Steve Martin and singer Edie Brickell in recent years) in support of Parkway-related matters, most particularly the foundation's grant for new facilities at the Parkway's Graveyard Fields site in North Carolina. The Steep Canyon Rangers' 2013 album Tell The Ones I Love featured a lively instrumental named "Graveyard Fields," and the group worked with filmmaker Paul Bonesteel, a member of the foundation's Advisory Panel, to produce a video to help raise money for the Graveyard Fields Project. That project included a new parking area and a restroom, both a huge benefit to fans of the area who have had inadequate parking and no facilities.

Rangers move on to their final song of the evening. From left, bassist Charles Humphrey, fiddler Nicky Sanders, guitarist Woody Platt, banjo player Graham Sharp, mandolin player Mike Guggino and percussionist Jeff Sipe, sitting in with the Rangers lately.

Last night's concert was in its closing number with fiddler Nicky Sanders clearly a crowd favorite. He strutted and pranced and danced about the stage as he was virtually burning up his fiddle with hot licks you wouln't believe on a great song called Auden's Train (I think), when disaster struck. He missed his step in the evening damps and pitched over the edge of the stage and onto an asphalt-surfaced apron between the stage and the audience. Fiddle attachments went flying as Sanders sprawled on the ground awkwardly, and banjo player Graham Sharp jumped down to see if he could help. In a show of guts and gumption and courage and, no doubt, a rush of adrenalin, Sanders bobbed back up, began reassembling the fittings on his fiddle, started tuning up, checked a nasty-looking wound to his left knee, then rejoined the band -- still playing its final song -- and got back on the stage for another few minutes of dancing and fiddling and making amazing music while the crowd came to its feet and applauded. Here are a few pictures taken a few moments apart -- and then the Rangers' final bow, as band members linked arms while the crowd cheered and clapped.

Nicky Sanders, left in front of the stage, puts his fiddle back together as Graham Sharp watches, and plays, from nearby.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

An interesting thing happens every day during the warm months at the Blue Ridge Music Center near Milepost 213 on the Blue Ridge Parkway. At noon, from May through October, a group of musicians, many of them professional players of considerable note, assemble in the breezeway between the museum and its intimate auditorium next door, and begins to play a variety of music reflecting the culture, history and lore of the mountains. It's free. People come from all over to listen. And it's the toe-tappingest place you'll find anywhere in the hills for the next four hours.

And on Fridays, something else happens. On Friday's it's an open jam, welcoming anyone who walks up to bring an instrument, or borrow a spare, or just join in or even lead the singing in a song. I've sat in this Jim Marshall and Friends Jam for five months now (bass fiddle), and we've had visitors from around the globe. (Mr. Marshall started the jam years ago and now resides in a nursing home; Mark Raynes and Renee Igo lead the Jim Marshall Jam in his absence.) A few weeks ago visitors included a fellow from Spain who lives in London and who came forward to sing some compositions of his own. A month ago, a woman who sings in a choir back home somewhere in the Midwest did a gorgeous version of Amazing Grace. Two weeks ago, a couple from Argentina came up and sang seven or eight Argentinian folk songs in Spanish -- just superb music, though I recognized maybe one word in 20 or so. They stole the show, as Mark Raynes put it.

But that's the beauty of the free Midday Mountain Music program that runs every day for six months of the year: you never know what you are going to hear or who you are going to hear it from, but it's always interesting. Some folks expect mostly bluegrass, yet what they hear is a mix of American roots music with a lot of influences from around the world. Bluegrass, yes, but also traditional mountain music, folk music, blues, gospel, country, olde timey music, new timey music, funny songs, sad songs, train songs, cabin-in-the-hills songs, moonshine songs, lonesome-for-the-Blue Ridge songs -- even a 19th century Josef Wagner march, "Under the Double Eagle," popularized by John Phillip Sousa's band before Benny Goodman and later all kinds of bluegrass players jumped all over it. I wouldn't be surprised to hear some R&B and beach music once in a while.

And here's the most amazing thing: This daily offering of music is played and sung by volunteers who put in more than 100 hours of performance time each every year. Add in travel time -- some come from two hours or more each way every week to perform -- and jam groups that can grow to more than 20 musicians at a sitting, and you've got thousands of hours donated to the Blue Ridge Parkway and the enjoyment of its visitors. Four hours of music, by the way, is a pretty long gig. These folks play because they want to. It is a service to the public, and judging by how many people come every day to sit and watch, they appreciate it.

So it was entirely appropriate and gratifying that the National Park Service recognized the volunteer Midday Musicians at a luncheon the other day at the Folk Art Center near the Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina. The annual gathering honors volunteers all along the Parkway who do a terrific job as interpreters and maintenance volunteers. My friends Mark Raynes and Renee Igo accepted the Parkway Partner Volunteers of the Year Award on behalf of all the musicians who play at the Blue Ridge Music Center.

With them were Richard Emmett, music program director at the center, and Blue Ridge Parkway Superintendent Mark Woods. The Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, the private fund-raising partner of the Parkway, agreed to operate programs at the center after the Parkway requested its help several years ago. The Foundation named Emmett to operate those programs, which include the Midday Mountain Music as well as the weekend concert series, which concludes today with the Steep Canyon Rangers.

At the awards ceremony Tuesday, Superintendent Mark Woods had this to say: "Through
your service, visitors to the Blue Ridge Music Center have the wonderful treat
of hearing authentic, live music seven days a week, every day the Music Center
is open. This service over eight
visitors seasons [since the opening of the Music Center] likely represents a
contribution of over 30,000 volunteer hours. How wonderful to consider how many
tunes have floated from instruments during that time." Amen.

About Me

Jack Betts is a journalist who moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia after nearly 40 years in journalism in North Carolina and Virginia. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he was a Pentagon photographer while in the Army, Washington correspondent for daily newspapers in Norfolk, Roanoke and Greensboro during the Watergate Era, Raleigh Bureau Chief of the Greensboro Daily News, editor of North Carolina Insight magazine, N.C. Public Television panelist and associate editor of The Charlotte Observer. He won six 1st place prizes in the N.C. Press Association's annual editorial competitions, and was inducted in 2006 into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame. He and his wife Martha B. and their dog Sadie live on an old farm near Meadows of Dan, VA. From May through October he plays bass in the Jim Marshall and Friends Jam on Friday afternoons at the Blue Ridge Music Center near milepost 213 just south of Galax, VA.